Death Penalty Alive In California

California’s Proposition 34, which would have repealed the state’s death penalty, was defeated.

With 98 percent of the vote counted Wednesday morning, 52 percent of California voters said they weren’t ready to do away with the ultimate punishment.

The measure would have reduced the maximum sentence for capital murder to life in prison without the possibility of parole and would have applied retroactively to the more than 720 condemned inmates on the nation’s largest death row.